Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. First, it's clouds of dust, thin, far away. Then, on the horizon, a line takes shape. Wagons, uniforms, cavalry. An army with a mission. The United States is coming. In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young gives the order, no pitched battles, no glorious stand. Scorch the grass, empty the outposts, scatter the herds.
This army must march into a void. Better to destroy Zion than to surrender it. This is no rebellion of the standard variety, more like a noose tightening on these troops. Begging the question, whose land is this? Those who came to build a kingdom? Or the nation they left behind, now marching to claim it as theirs? The Mormon Rebellion is about to begin.
I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. To help tell us more about this important event, we welcome Professor Peter Coviello of the University of Illinois. His book, Make Yourselves Gods, Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, was a finalist for the John Whitmer Historical Association Award for Best History Book.
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Hello, Peter. Welcome back. Nice to see you again. Don, it's a pleasure to see you. Thank you for having me. You were last with us in 2023, another world ago. 300 episodes ago.
Another world ago.
Yeah. Check the archives for episode 86, Mormons and the founding of Salt Lake City, in which we discussed, Peter and I, the origins and Western migrations of those people called Mormons through the 1830s and 40s. Today, we dive more into the 1850s. after the establishment of Utah as a territory of the United States, all a consequence of the victorious Mexican-American War.
Adherents to this highly controversial religion have now set up shop in Utah. That's what we're going to be talking about today. Three years is a long time ago, Peter. I'm a bit rusty. Let's briefly review those origins, shall we?
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Chapter 2: What led to the Mormons' migration to the West?
Very, very, very quickly, he writes the Book of Mormon in upstate New York and gathers around him a bunch of detractors, but also a lot of followers. Over the course of the decade, Mormons migrate west. Joseph Smith is intensely charismatic and also intensely theologically imaginative. So he writes the Book of Mormon, but he keeps writing and he keeps thinking and he keeps proselytizing.
Chapter 3: How did Brigham Young respond to the approaching U.S. Army?
And as he does so, the faith gathers to itself more adherence and a more vehement kind of detractor.
It's really the ultimate Protestant religion in that it's correcting what's wrong with Protestantism, isn't it? He's...
Well, I mean, it depends on who you ask, right? They understand themselves as a vigorously counter-Protestantism. Oh. That is to say, like, the whole point of Mormonism, or not the whole point, but a big point of Mormonism is millennia of religion has conspired to get you to believe that God is different from you, that the world is fallen. In fact, this is incorrect.
Christianity itself is an apostasy. Why? Because God is a brethren human, and you yourself in the mortal world are living in an unfallen body. And you yourself are speeding toward divinization because God wants everything that's best about human life, embodiment, joy, friendship, love, to be eternalized.
Wow.
And to be yours in eternity. So yeah, that's the pitch.
You've already left me behind.
Yeah.
I mean, Joseph Smith made a declaration that humans, more than following God, could become divine themselves, one with him, of God. Exactly. That's where the title of your book comes from, right?
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Chapter 4: What were the key events leading to the Mormon Rebellion?
And by 1839, they have created an order. Yeah, they have created something called Nauvoo.
Nauvoo. Nauvoo. It's on the edge of Illinois. Yeah, it's a river town on the edge of Illinois, which is their sort of own town. And that's where the grandest theological speculation that Smith will produce really happens. It's a scene of super intense theological foment.
It's where Smith comes to the revelation that one of the key components of exaltation, of the idea that humans can exalt themselves into gods, is polygamy, is plural patriarchal marriage. Right. And there's a lot, a lot, a lot of different ways of reading that. Is it a restoration of Old Testament beliefs?
Is it a hyper-patriarchalization of a world that's becoming more industrial and more gender-equitable in the 19th century? You can make those things stick. For me, in my reading of Mormonism, it's really just an essential part of what Smith understands as the theology of Mormonism. That is to say... The world is unfallen.
We live in these ā in unfallen bodies and it's incredibly hard to believe that. You need a discipline of practice. That for him is plural marriage. Anyway, he has that revelation. They don't publicize it for a while, not surprisingly because it makes people furious. But of course ā Already, scandal surrounds them.
They're accused of many things, but particularly being accused of being perverts. People whose pretend devotions have led them into perversity. And that accusation, of course, allows people like Lil Burn Boggs to say, what we should probably do is exterminate.
I mean, it's really deep. What does the Latter Day Saint refer to? What is the name of the movement?
So it's the world is like we are in a state of revelation in the present tense. That revelation didn't end in the days of the Bible. It exists now in the present tense. God speaks as much in the present tense. Now, of course, like that particular version of counter-Protestant devotion has other analogs like
The Mormons don't have to look around them very far to see what it looks like to be a kind of belief practice askance that of normative American Protestants. That's how native peoples were persecuted explicitly. as heathens, as people whose backwards counterparts and beliefs made them, again, fit for extermination.
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Chapter 5: How did the assassination of Joseph Smith impact the Mormons?
Sure. Though others are better able to speak of that than I.
It's been a joy to talk to you. Peter Coviello is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, and we have been discussing his book, Make Yourselves Gods, Mormons, and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism. What a fascinating book that is to get.
Peter, is there a website that we should be looking at, ways to keep track of you? I am the head of the English department at UIC in Chicago, and you can look, if you put in my name in Chicago, you'll find more than enough about me there.
There'll be a line outside your office, Peter. No. Thank you. What a pleasure. I appreciate it so much. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.
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